Portobello Books

“Street Without A Name” is a wry, vivid and honest recollection of, and reflection on, modern Bulgaria from poet & travel writer Kapka Kassabova. An irreverent and revealing personal portrait of a little-known country perched on the eastern edge of Europe - captured by one of its most eloquent and engaging expats.

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At the perimeter of Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport stands the Annawadi slum. Here, next to one of Asia's busiest transport hubs and the city's gleaming glass towers, lives rubbish collectors, builders and migrants from rural India.

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Rudolf leaves his comfortable origins in Delft by ship for Java to help run the family's estates there. He moves from plantation to plantation, attempting to understand the ways of the local peoples, their version of Islam and their relationship to their land. On a visit to the capital, Jakarta, he falls in love with a teenage girl, Jenny, who he courts surreptitiously via his sister, with grave consequence...

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In this unique book, part eulogy, part history, part travelogue, Charlie English goes in search of the best snow on the planet. Along the way he explains the extraordinary hold this commonplace phenomenon has over us, and reveals the ongoing drama of our relationship with it. Combining on-the-slopes experience with off-piste research, Charlie English's journey begins with the magical moment when his two-yea...

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Separated by a narrow stretch of swamp-like waters, and distinguished by the color of their skin, the Black Jews and the White Jews have been locked in a rancorous feud for centuries. Only now, when their combined number has diminished to less than 50 and they are on the threshold of extinction, have the two remaining Jewish communities in south India begun to realize that their destiny, and their undoing, ...

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Years ago, Madame Verona and her husband built a home for themselves on a hill in a forest above a small village. There they lived in isolation, practising their music, and chopping wood to see them through the cold winters. When Mr Verona died, the locals might have expected that the legendary beauty would return to the village, but Madame Verona had enough wood to keep her warm during the years it would t...

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The tropical island of Sri Lanka is a paradise for tourists, but in 2009 it became a hell for its Tamil minority, as decades of civil war between the Tamil Tiger guerrillas and the government reached its bloody climax. Caught in the crossfire were hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, doctors, farmers, fishermen, nuns and other civilians. And the government ensured through a strict media blackout that th...

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Amid the lush abundance of Java's landscape, two boys spend their days exploring the vast lakes and teeming forests. But as time passes the boys come to realize that their shared sense of adventure cannot bridge the gulf between their backgrounds, for one is the son of a Dutch plantation owner, and the other the son of a servant. Inevitably, as they grow up, they grow estranged and it is not until years lat...

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'I've been summoned, Thursday, ten sharp.' So begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before, but this time she knows it will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. 'Marry me', the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.As she rides the tram to h...

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In the late 1630s, Andrea Stuart's earliest known maternal ancestor set sail from England, lured by the promise of the New World, to settle in Barbados where he fell by chance into the lucrative life of a sugar plantation owner. With George Ashby's first crop, the cane revolution was underway and would go on to transform the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches, establishing a thriving worldwide industry...

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The plans are drawn up, a site is chosen, foundations are dug: a building comes into being with the expectation that it will stay put and stay for ever. But a building is a capricious thing: it is inhabited and changed, and its existence is a tale of constant and curious transformation.

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This is the story of a journey like no other, as Jacek Hugo-Bader makes his way across Siberia, from Moscow to Vladivostok, in the middle of winter. Travelling alone in a modified Russian jeep, he traverses a continent that is two-and-a-half times bigger than America, awash with bandits and not always fully equipped with roads. Along the way, Hugo-Bader discovers a great deal of tragedy, but also plenty of ...

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It is an early spring evening in 1943 when the air-raid sirens wail out over the East End of London. From every corner of Bethnal Green, people emerge from pubs, cinemas and houses and set off for the shelter of the tube station. But at the entrance steps, something goes badly wrong, the crowd panics, and 173 people are crushed to death. When an enquiry is called for, it falls to the local magistrate, Laure...

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From the author of the award-winning White Fever, Kolyma Diaries is an excursion into one of the world's last remaining badlands, a place full of Gulag ghosts and living wrecks. All along the 2000 kilometres of the Kolyma highway, Bader is plied with vodka. He hears mesmerizing, sometimes devastating, tales of the journeys that brought his 'fellow travellers', the people who give him lifts, to this benighte...

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At the turn of the twentieth century, Arctic explorer Edward Mackley sets out to reach the North Pole and vanishes into the icy landscape without a trace. He leaves behind a young wife, Emily, who awaits his return for decades, her dreams and devotion gradually freezing into rigid widowhood.

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A boxer-turned-hitman faces an impossible mission to kill his brother; an old lady sets up a gang of her own teenage vigilantes after being mugged herself; a village boy faces the gruesome end of his beloved pet piglet; a retired geography teacher dreams of places he's never been; a clown on the make talks an impoverished lion tamer into selling his lion to gangsters; and, a fading beauty is courted by a su...

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'I took up with Hindi at a time when it seemed my life had buckled out from under me - I no longer had the language to describe my own life. So I decided I'd borrow someone else's.' Having survived a serious illness and now at an impasse in her career, Rich spontaneously accepts a freelance assignment to go to India, where she finds herself utterly overwhelmed by the place and the language. Before she knows...

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Somewhere in the jungles of Uganda, there hides a fugitive rebel-leader: he is said to take his orders direct from the spirit world and, together with his ragged army of brutalised child soldiers, he has left a bloody trail of devastation across his country. Intrigued by the myths, Matthew green heads off into the war zone, meeting the victims, the peacemakers and the regional prowerbrokers, as he tracks do...

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The protagonists of Sana Krasikov's indelible stories are mostly women - some of them are new to America; some still live in the former Soviet Union, in Georgia or Russia; and, some have returned to Russia to find a country they barely recognize and people they no longer understand. Mothers leave children behind; children abandon their parents.

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To the charity workers, Dadaab refugee camp is a humanitarian crisis; to the Kenyan government, it is a 'nursery for terrorists'; to the western media, it is a dangerous no-go area; but to its half a million residents, it is their last resort. Situated hundreds of miles from any other settlement, deep within the inhospitable desert of northern Kenya where only thorn bushes grow, Dadaab is a city like no oth...

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